I have spent the last 80 hours or so without speaking to another soul. (I am not counting buying stuff at the store, or communicating via computer.) I can’t help but wonder if anyone would miss me if I disappeared.
It’s easy to wallow in self-pity, but it’s not pity that I want or need. I just need human interaction. It’s really starting to get to me. I’m wondering how long I can go like this before I really start going crazy—I mean, certifiably loonie, with an indication for admission to the inpatient psych ward.
You know you’re pathetic and lonely when you start wishing that you could hear voices in your head, even if all they’re doing is berating you for how pathetic you are.
The bigger problem, though, is that I don’t want to do a goddamn thing about it. Although I don’t really know if “want” is the right word for it. I mean, sure, part of it is being paralyzed by fear. I’ve spent so much time by myself that I don’t even know what it’s like to have friends anymore. Interacting with people is becoming strange to me, and a little frightening.
I don’t understand where I went wrong. I don’t know why I can’t seem to muster the energy to reach out. Because clearly no one is going to come looking for me.
I realize that I could’ve been dead for three days, and because it was the weekend, no one would know I was gone.
What I wouldn’t do for a chance to start over again. I would be willing to go back all the way to college, even, just to see if I could somehow make things go right for me. Despite the fact that I’ve actually accomplished one thing in my life, I would give it away in a second for a chance to be a normal human being.
I’m really getting sick of this half-life existence. I feel like I’m up against a wall. I don’t really know what to do next. Where am I supposed to go? What am I supposed to accomplish? I feel like I’m just hanging out here gathering dust, and I just don’t want to do anything to help myself.
There is something seriously wrong with me.
I admit it. Apple has gotten me successfully hooked. I bought my Mac Mini when Tiger came out. I’m probably going to be buying another machine when Leopard comes out.
My eyes are lingering on the MacBook (the successor to the iBook, which is the machine I currently own) As I mentioned in my diatribe about Dells vs Macs below, the price can be misleading. The MacBook costs $1,299, and it’s only a Core Duo running at 2.0 GHz, not a Core Duo 2 running at 2.16 GHz. Still, you get the built-in iSight, the 667 MHz RAM, optical digital audio, DVI output, built-in 802.11g, built-in Bluetooth 2.0, and Firewire, not to mention a way better OS than Windows. (OK, fine, I’m not a gamer, but it’s an x86 machine. Go ahead and install BootCamp and run XP if you really want to.)
I have serious doubts about saving enough money for one anytime soon, but we’ll see.
x86 machines have been traditionally much cheaper than their Mac counterparts, but things have improved a lot lately. Still, a Macbook Pro supposedly costs as much as two similarly spec’ed Dells. Naturally, the author ignores certain things (which he at least acknowledges): built-in iSight, bundled software, faster RAM.
Curious about how true this is, I went over to the Dell website and tried configuring a computer with specs similar to the Macbook Pro Core 2 Duo:
Dell E1505 Dual Core
Components PROCESSOR Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processor T7400 (4MB Cache/2.16GHz/667MHz FSB) OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows® XP Media Center Edition 2005 UPGRADE TO WINDOWS VISTA No Express Upgrade to Windows Vista Selected LCD PANEL 15.4 inch UltraSharp™ Wide Screen SXGA+ Display with TrueLife™ MEMORY 1GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz, 2 Dimm HARD DRIVE 120GB 5400rpm SATA Hard Drive OPTICAL DRIVE 8X CD/DVD Burner (DVD+/-RW) with double-layer DVD+R write capability VIDEO CARD 256MB ATI MOBILITY™ RADEON® X1400 HyperMemory™ SOUND OPTIONS Integrated Audio
Accessories BATTERY OPTIONS 53 WHr 6-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery WIRELESS CARDS Dell Wireless 1390b/g (54Mbps) BLUETOOTH OPTIONS Dell Wireless 355 Bluetooth Internal (2.0 + Enhanced Data Rate) WIRELESS ENTERTAINMENT Interlink ExpressCard Media Remote for Bluetooth-enabled Notebooks
Software PRODUCTIVITY No productivity suite- Includes Microsoft Works 8. DOES NOT INCLUDE MS WORD ANTI-VIRUS & SECURITY No Security Subscription PHOTOS, MUSIC & MORE! Trial pack- Basic and trial products from Corel and Yahoo BURN & VIDEO EDITING Combo: Sonic DigitalMedia and MyDVD Plus (DVD+RW only)
Service WARRANTY AND SERVICE 1Yr Ltd Warranty and Mail-In Service DIAL-UP INTERNET ACCESS 6 Months America Online Internet Access Included
The Dell E1505 would run me $1,477.
Here are the specs of the Macbook Pro Core 2 Duo
2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” (no mention of future upgrade options to “Leopard” though) 1440 x 900 pixels SXGA+ 1GB memory 667 MHz 120GB hard drive 5400 rpm 6x double-layer SuperDrive (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW) ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics with 128MB SDRAM with DVI output Optical Audio Gigabit Ethernet Airport Express 802.11g built-in Bluetooth 2.0 Apple Remote iLife 2006 which includes iMovie and iDVD for editing and burning DVDs, as well as GarageBand and iPhoto 1 year of Apple Care
The 15” Macbook Pro Core 2 Duo would run for $1,999
So yeah, a Dell would save me $522, which is nothing to sneeze at, but a far cry from the $1,143 that the article is claiming. However, there were are a few things on the MacBook Pro that I wasn’t able to get the equivalent for on the Dell:
- Firewire
- built in iSight
- DVI output
- Radeon x1600 (vs Radeon x1400)
- 667 MHz RAM (vs 533 MHz RAM)
- optical audio
- Gigabit Ethernet
These pieces of hardware easily make up the difference in price. One may argue that if you don’t want this stuff, you can’t buy a cheaper Mac without it, and that’s true. If all you want is a laptop for surfing the Web at Starbucks or something, you should totally go with the $1,031 Dell, although there are far cheaper, just as capable machines out there.
We’re talking about quality. It’s simply the difference between a luxury car and an economy car. Just like no one buys a BMW to save money, no one buys an Apple because they want a cheap machine. Each has their place.
And I could rant all about how I can’t stand Windows XP, but that’s another blog post altogether.
Then there’s the software: you’d have to get separate pieces of software to obtain the functionality of iLife. Something for your photos, something for your video editing needs, something for creating music. I realize that not everyone is going to have the need for this (I have yet to fire up iMovie) but there is added value in these things.
And the thing that is crucial is customer service. With a Dell, you can only talk to someone on the phone, and if worse comes to worse, you have to mail your machine in. The awesome thing about Apple is that you can just show up at the Genius Bar at their store and get some help for free, and this is even after AppleCare expires. Sure, Apple won’t replace your machine for free after the 1 year warranty period, but I think the face-to-face interaction is particularly valuable.
So it comes to this: yes, the Macbook Pro is far from being a barebones machine. It comes with all sorts of crazy bells and whistles that you don’t need if you’re just going to surf the Web and maybe do some Powerpoint presentations. And if you’re a seasoned Windows computer user, I would go with the Dell, or even better, a much cheaper, just as capable machine.
But I would definitely recommend a Mac to a newbie for two things: (1) ease of use—it just works and (2) easy access to face-to-face tech support for free.
hopelessly adrift in the eyes of the ghost again down on my knees and my hands in the air again pushing my face in the memory of you again but i never know if it’s real never know how i wanted to feel
never quite said what i wanted to say to you never quite managed the words to explain to you never quite knew how to make them believable and now the time has gone another time undone
hopelessly fighting the devil futility feeling the monster climb deeper inside of me feeling him gnawing my heart away hungrily i’ll never lose this pain never dream of you again
Man, Lee Smolin, theoretical physicist to the nth degree, is my hero. The first I had heard of him was his book Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, a discussion of the possible unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity, which covers string theory and loop quantum gravity. I also noted his name in João Magueijo’s book Faster than the Speed of Light.
Smolin’s recent book is The Trouble with Physics, which is a history of grand unification, a critique on string theory, and a critique on the sociology of academia. He is straight up with the dearth of minorities and women getting tenure (something that was all too evident even in the social sciences and humanities when I was at college [see Oscar Campomanes, Enrique Bonus, Amando Cabeza].) He talks about the way that the old-boys network functions, and how faculty hiring at universities is determined:
Even in these frank exchanges, you seldom hear really negative comments. When people have nothing good to report, they will often just say, “Let’s move on. I’d rather not comment” or something mild like “I’m not excited.” But there are times when the mere mention of a name invokes an “Absolutely not!” or “Don’t go there” or “Are you kidding?” or the definitive “Over my dead body!” In my experience, in every such instance the candidate fell into one and often two of the following three categories: They were (1) female, (2) not white, and/or (3) someone inventing his or her own research program rather than following the mainstream. There are of course women and nonwhites who elicit no objections. But, again in my experience, these are cases where the candidate hews tightly to an established research program.
There is heated debate among physicists over why there are not more women or blacks in physics, compared with other fields just as challenging, such as mathematics or astronomy. I believe the answer is simple: blatant prejudice. Anyone who has served, as I have, on decades of hiring committees and hasn’t seen naked prejudice in action is either blind to it or dishonest. There are rules and ethics of confidentiality that prevent me from giving examples, but there are several detailed studies that tell the story. (page 336 of the hardcover edition)
(See, for example, “A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT,” vol. XI, no. 4, March 1999…. More information on issues on women in science is available from the American Physical Society… and from the committee on Faculty Diversity at Harvard University….) (page 371 of the hardcover edition)
(Emphasis mine.)
Smolin goes on to talk about how in his experience, affirmative action was never about elevating someone unqualified above others who were. In a tight competition where there is no easy way to judge who should be chosen, this is the only time that affirmative action makes a difference. Like Chris Rock says, “I don’t think I should get accepted to a school over a white person if I get a lower mark on a test. But if there’s a tie? Fuck him! Shit, you had a 400-year head start, motherfucker!”
(Another Chris Rock quote that I think is applicable: “A black C student can’t run no fucking company. A black C student can’t even be the manager of Burger King. Meanwhile, a white C student just happens to be the president of the United States of America!” This is the type of unfairness that affirmative action is trying to remedy. It was never about letting underprivileged minority kids with Ds and Fs into college ahead of the white and Asian kids with As and Bs. It’s about the black and brown kids with 4.0 GPAs but no honors or AP classes because their school didn’t have enough funding for them, who without affirmative action would never get into college because all the spots get taken by white and Asian kids from affluent schools (with sometimes massive grade inflation), with their GPAs of 5.0 because of the 6 honors and AP classes they’re in. Can you really believe that these kids with 5.0s are necessarily going to do better or work harder than these kids with 4.0s? And consider, underprivileged minorities are unlikely to be able to get junior out of academic probation by donating a building like some of these rich folks can. And don’t tell me that never happens.)
So I’m tired of hearing the “level playing field” bullshit, and the stupid idea that racism is over. Most rich people I know didn’t get where they are because of “merit” They damn well inherited their privilege, and don’t try to tell me otherwise.
I stumbled upon this post about NeXTSTEP (the OS that Steve Jobs created after leaving Apple way back when), which basically already had almost all the features of Mac OS X. Which makes sense. Mac OS (what is now known as Classic) was an evolutionary dead-end with regards to operating systems, about on par with Windows 3.11. And while Apple worked on the vaporware that was known as Copland and even while they flirted with BeOS (what could’ve been, huh?), NeXT was already there and was already a decently established development environment. Hell, it had already spawned an Open Source project (GNUstep) before Apple finally decided to get their shit together and bring Steve back.
I think back to how primitive the computer I used back then was. It was a 386/33 with 32 MB of RAM running MS-DOS 4.01 and Windows 3.0. Windows was crap. I used DOS mostly. It was closer to the good old days of playing around with my Commodore 64 except with no sound, although VGA graphics with 256 colors was pretty sweet. I managed to learn Pascal using Borland software. Long before the Internet had blossomed, I connected to BBSes with a 2400 bps modem (8 times faster than the 300 baud modem I had on my Commodore 64) I sent e-mail via UUCP and read news on FIDOnet using packet readers.
And so it shocks me that Mac OS X functionality was already extant. Granted, NeXT cubes cost nearly as much as a new car (and that 386/33 cost almost $2,000!) and the 80386 was just the first processor that Intel made that could actually run UNIX (although it would probably be excruciatingly painful to do so.) Clearly, NeXT was not making computers for the home.
But fast-forward back to the present. Where is the innovation from Apple with regards to OS design? Aqua is ultimately just a more polished, “lickable” version of the NeXTSTEP GUI, and, functionality wise, Mail.app hasn’t really changed much. WYSIWYG is taken for granted. Mac OS X basically inherited NeXTSTEP’s (and UNIX’s) capabilities of playing nice in a multi-protocol network environment. (Even to this day, I end up weeping in agony whenever I try to setup Shared folders on Windows.) XCode (neé Project Builder) already existed.
The thing is, Apple makes home computers. Sure, you can run Mac OS X on an XServe in an enterprise environement, but most people are probably using an iMac, or a Powerbook, or a Mac Mini at home. This is where Apple differs from NeXT significantly. You don’t have to mortgage your home or sacrifice your first born to own a Mac these days. They are pretty much similarly priced to their x86 brand name counterparts.
I think the seeds of some serious innovation are already in place, though. The new high concept is the hypervisor. Imagine running multiple OSes natively on one machine. Forget about dual booting. Consider running Vista the way you can run Mac OS Classic or XDarwin. Who needs a separate gaming machine, unless you want a console (which is probably the smarter move anyways. Who still plays games on their computer, for God’s sake?!) And thanks to Intel, Apple might have a slight head start in this race. Virtualization is built into the next generation of Intel chips. By the time these chips become ubiquitous and cheap, I bet you Apple will have a working hypervisor built in to their OS, just a click away from being able to run Windows while still having a UNIX-based, nearly uncrashable OS running the show at the same time.
This is all geekery, I understand. Virtualization probably doesn’t seem to be such a big deal to the non-geek. But I think it’s going to be big.
In any case, Apple has made some innovations when it comes to hardware. Think wi-fi (where would be without Airport?) Think real plug-and-play and Firewire. And while the following is something only a geek could love, Apple has finally modernized the x86 platform, freeing it from the shackles of the ‘80’s era “real mode” that was in vogue when the 80286 came out, and from the ancient, decrepit tyranny of BIOS, a sad relic of the uncontested reign of IBM, still unbetrayed by Microsoft. GPT: no more having to care about the difference between primary and extended partitions. EFI: no more having to care if you have an IRQ free for that PCI card your adding, or of hardware conflicting with each other.
Apple may not be making big dramatic strides that the average non-geek can appreciate, but they are making steady progress. Better that than having to wait six years for the next marginal upgrade.
I just read this post about depression by alison on bluishorange, and I am so there.
The scene is so familiar, and I’ve wondered for eleven years now what my alter ego in a parallel universe would’ve accomplished without this cloud of serious mental illness. I can’t even imagine. Sometimes, when I’m not wallowing in self-pity, when I can actually think clearly, I’m amazed that I’ve even gotten as far as I’ve gotten.
Last Friday night was bearable, although I did go straight to bed at 7 pm, and I didn’t wake up until 8 am the next morning. For the past month I’ve been sitting in this fog, not wanting to deal with the world. All I did was drag myself out of bed, go to work, come home, and then go back to bed. Shampoo, wash, and repeat. Thank God I like my job, otherwise my existence would be utterly pointless and it would also be a living hell.
Saturday I resolved to actually clean my apartment, which has been in a state of regretful squalor for a good three months now. My will, unfortunately, waned, and I decided to go to sleep at 11 pm, despite knowing there was a party downtown, and that other people were probably having fun with their lives.
But I couldn’t actually fall asleep. Having not spoken to a single soul for 28 hours straight had really gotten to me, and I was feeling pretty shitty, so I got out of bed and drove to L.A. to my parents’ house. I got there at 12:45 am and no one was awake. But like I said, at least the dog is always happy to see me. I finally got to sleep and felt much better in the morning. I can’t tell you what changed in my mood. It’s all very perplexing to me.
E randomly called me up today and we somehow got to the topic of death. (Lovely stuff.) Now I know I shouldn’t be one to complain because his dad was actually killed, but I think that I’ve been having a hard time dealing with my dad’s heart attack a year and a half ago. I mean, he’s doing great now, and he’s past that critical juncture of 1 year. The 1 year survival rate of having an infarct in the territory supplied by the left anterior descending coronary artery is pretty poor, particularly when you present with new-onset heart failure, but my dad has always been good at beating the odds. But I think it made my already fragile world even more tenuous.
B and S and E have all asked me if I’m dating anyone, and the answer, as always, is no. Part of it is that I’ve been pretty much emotionally maimed and mutilated and I don’t remember how to trust other people. Let me tell you, this makes it hard to form meaningful relationships with people you meet. It’s really easy for me to see signs of rejection, even if they aren’t really there. My first reaction to anything negative in a nascent friendship is to retreat and disappear.
Yes, the past two years have been kind of lonely. Just a little.
But the other part is that I haven’t been as aggressive about going out as I used to be. My oldest friend likes to use the statistical argument: meet enough women, however randomly, and you’re bound to meet someone who likes you eventually. It may take decades, but I know that he’s right. I tried applying this argument to my life in med school, but, as you can see, it didn’t really work out. I just need to meet more people, really, but I don’t even want to do that any more.
I find myself going home to visit my parents a lot.
The thing that I learned that has really messed me up badly is that, no matter how much someone loves you, ultimately, in the end, everyone leaves.
S tried to argue with me that it’s different if you die, in contrast to, say, betrayal, or moving halfway across the country, but it all adds up to the same thing. When everything is fleeting and temporary, where is the sense in trusting in anything? (Of course, it doesn’t help that I’ve been betrayed, but what are you going to do?)
So on Sunday, I went to watch “The Prestige” with my dad. My dad is a movie fiend. He loves going to the theater, even to watch shitty movies. He tells me he’s been obsessed with the silver screen since he was in high school, sometimes ditching class to watch in the fetid, non-air-conditioned theaters in the Philippines, spending a weeks’ worth of lunch money just for the treat, even if it mean being hungry for the next seven days. It’s been a while since I watched a movie with him.
As an aside, I’ve liked every Christopher Nolan movie that I’ve watched. The bizarre twists in everything he’s done just leave me in awe. He’s got M. Night Shymalan beat hands down when it comes to surprise endings. But I won’t talk about the movie here, except that it’s hardcore steampunk, dealing with electromagnetism and Arthur C. Clarke’s Three Laws and even the ethics of cloning (all right, I lied, that’s a big-time spoiler right there, try not to remember it.) Tesla is my hero. Boo for Edison.
But what I’m saying, I guess, is that we’re all going to die sometime, and will you feel like you’ve spent enough time with your loved ones when that time comes?
I’ve dealt with too much death, I guess. There is something perverse about watching the unfolding drama of a human being who is dying. There is something horrifically perverse about watching it multiple times. There is something awful and grotesque about having to deal with death almost every single day because it’s part of your job description, and you almost—almost— become blasé about it, except that you’ll be thinking about it for years on end, remembering their names etched onto your brains. The terrible grandeur, the horrifying magnificence of it all makes me want to puke sometimes.
And so, with this as a backdrop, I wend my way through life almost deliberately alone (except, you know what? I don’t want to be alone) because anyone that I grow to love will always abandon me. Boo-hoo.
That, I think, is the heart of my pathology. So maybe I’ve made some headway with identifying the problem. God only knows how the hell I’m going to succeed in fixing it. That is, if something like this is even fixable.
I think of having that MI one day alone in some squalid one bedroom apartment, ready to go work, going face down in the bathroom. I think about how long it will take before someone will realize that I’m gone, truly and utterly gone. I think about dying alone, and part of me tries to get used to it, because one day it will happen, but most of me just becomes hysterical and insanely depressed at the thought.
There have been days, and sometimes weeks, which I’d rather just sit out and maybe even disappear completely from. But I guess it’s that thought—that life is so goddamn fragile—that makes me grudgingly get out of bed and go to work. Because, if nothing else in my life has any significance whatsoever, at least I like my job, and maybe I even do a little good sometimes.
Charlie White writes about what he hates about the iPod which is, I guess, praising with faint damnation. First off, the proper colloquial term is “hatorade” or maybe “hatoration” if you want to get pendatic. Get it right.
But, seriously, no one wants FM. FM radio sucks. FM radio is, if you think about it, probably a big part of the reason why iPods got so popular in the first place, because FM radio sucks so bad. I can’t stand that shit. After listening to about 30 minutes worth of commercials, all I get is crap music anyway. If I had to drive from San Diego to L.A. with nothing but FM radio, I think I would kill myself.
Now Bluetooth and/or WiFi would be cool, but fact of the matter is that there’s no way the RIAA or MPAA would let you get away with it, at least probably not without making a deal about crippling your device with DRM the way that Microsoft is outright maiming the Zune. As long as Apple toes the line and uses their DRM on iTMS (which is far more permissive than any of the other sad, sorry mp3 stores, unless you count the DRMless allofmp3.com whose legal status is, to put it mildly, a little shady), then the RIAA and MPAA can’t say shit about the fact that I can rip the CDs that I still buy into DRMless mp3s (or more exactly, AAC files) even though what they’d really like is for me to have to buy multiple versions of the same song. (Seriously, is the Zune even going to let you play DRMless music?)
I still think that stackable iPods are the way to go. 80 GB not enough for your song collection? Buy another one or two or three and network them via Bluetooth or wifi. And have them appear like one gigantic iPod to your Mac.
Again, I think that the Powers That Be™ would have a total shit-fit if Apple allowed DRMless file sharing, so unless we get rid of these guys, it’s unlikely we’ll be seeing a wireless iPod any time soon.
And iTunes: thank God it doesn’t abide by the usual Windows conventions. iTunes on Windows feels almost like iTunes on Mac OS X, and when I switch out of iTunes, I find myself shocked with horror that I’m in XP. As for ease of use, sure, there are people who are so tech-incompetent that you wouldn’t trust them with anything more complicated than a toaster, but as far as seamless integration goes, I’m all for the Mac OS X (or should I say NeXTSTEP?) way of making it “just work.” Plug in your iPod, boom (or blammo), you’re synced, and you didn’t even have to click on anything (except maybe for the stupid system-tray indicator in the taskbar) And if you’d rather manually pick and choose what you sync, more power to you, there is an option to do that. C’mon, compared to the average Windows app, iTunes is a no-brainer.
What will Jobs et al have in store for us in the next 5 years? Who knows. Maybe it’ll be another flop like the Cube (except, wait a minute, I’m typing this on a Mac Mini—surely I’m not the only one who sees the similarities.) Maybe it’ll be vaporware like Copland. Or maybe it’ll be a hyper-advanced technology that no mere mortal will grok, like the Newton (or NeXTSTEP.) Apple has been a loser company for far longer than this particular winning streak, and yet we’ve seen this company come back from the grave. Sure, it’s questionable whether or not Apple would survive sans Steve (and the ‘90’s tells us that it probably wouldn’t), but for now, I say milk the guy’s brain for all it’s worth.
It is interesting that of all the home computer companies of the late ‘70’s/early ‘80’s, really only two have survived: Apple and IBM (Resquiate in Pacem, Commodore, Tandy, Atari) and IBM doesn’t make home computers any more, not even Thinkpads. (And interestingly, both have survived the juggernaut known as Microsoft Windows by jumping on the UNIX bandwagon—or I guess in the case of IBM, never letting go of it in the first place.) Five years ago I was still on x86 hardware running RedHat 7.0. I wonder where I’ll be five years from now?
A self-fulfilling prophecy of endless possibility You roll in reams across the street In algebra, in algebra
The fences that you cannot climb The sentences that do not rhyme In all that you can ever change The one you’re looking for
It gets you down It gets you down
There’s no spark No light in the dark
It gets you down It gets you down You traveled far What have you found That there’s no time There’s no time To analyse To think things through To make sense
Like cows in the city, they never looked so pretty By power carts and blackouts Sleeping like babies
It gets you down It gets you down You’re just playing a part You’re just playing a part
You’re playing a part Playing a part And there’s no time There’s no time To analyse Analyse Analyse
So I give up. This is all there is, and there ain’t no mo’. God only knows what sort of fucked up crisis would actually get me to save myself, but I’m too fucking tired.
It’s not really a choice. As Ben so eloquently stated the other day, this is involuntary celibacy, and it doesn’t matter if I can live with it or not. Like many things I’ve experienced in the past seven years, you either live with it, or you don’t live. Those are pretty much the only options.
And as much as just ending it all might actually be a good way to stop hurting all the fucking time, I just don’t have the balls. Deep down inside, I’m a chickenshit, and after all, that is ultimately my problem, isn’t it? Never let it be said that I was ever brave, and that I fought to overcome insuperable odds.
It is interesting that I’m no longer sleeping all the time. Unlike the classic victims of depression, I sleep 10 hours, maybe 12 hours in a row when I get like this. Normally you ask people who you suspect of depression whether or not they can sleep at night, and if they’re depressed, they tell you that they can’t. Either the can’t get to sleep, or they keep waking up in the middle of the night. I guess I have this weird hybrid symptomatology. While I have hypersomnia, it’s not very restful sleep. I probably wake up at least three or four times in the middle of the night, and I feel extraordinarily tired by the time I actually have to wake up.
Like most depressive episodes I experience, I can’t really think of a good reason why I feel this way. If you think about it, my life is actually going relatively well. I went to my semi-annual performance evaluation the other day, and my supervisors all had good things to say about me. It’s like when I got that award for being in the top 15% of my class—I’m pretty sure a normal person would be pretty psyched and feel at least a touch of superiority about it. Instead, I just mope around, because who the fuck cares? I’ve got no one to share my triumphs with, so what’s the point? Well, I know that’s the heart of the pathology. There are at least four, and maybe slightly more, people who care at least a little, and why that isn’t enough, I’ll will never understand.
I wish that the things that I accomplish meant enough to me to get me out of my funk. I guess there is a really sick part of me that thinks that whatever I do is never enough. I suppose that’s the part of me that has driven me to the ridiculous distances that I’ve managed to get myself to, always striving to get farther and farther, without thinking about what exactly that costs until too late.
When was the last time I was happy?
Actually it wasn’t that long ago. It lasted for a few hours a couple of months ago, and despite knowing it wasn’t going to last, I remember being OK with that. That’s just the way happiness is, I guess. No one is happy 24 hours a day. I don’t care if you’re always smiling and singing “zippee-de-doo-dah” out of your asshole, you have to feel the whole spectrum of human emotion to be truly alive.
And it was all about just doing the things that made me happy when I was a kid: playing in the ocean, lying on the sand. But the kicker was this: I could share the experience with someone. It just wouldn’t be the same if I went out there by myself.
Now you might say that it’s just because I have a crush on this woman, but you know what, she will probably never see me in That Way™. This is Gospel truth if I can’t ever get my shit together, and probably even if I do. But that’s OK. I’m all right with the Friend Zone™. Sure, I dream sometimes, but hell, I also think about what I could do if a million dollars landed in my lap. She is who she is, and she has saved my ass from certain suicide, and I am lucky as it is.
(But, like I said, it’s never enough.)
So to get back to this aching fear of intimacy that is an aggressive malignancy upon my soul: I know that if I can’t shake this thing, it’s going to kill me. I don’t know what it was last week that made me realize that there’s probably about a 75% chance that I’m going to die by my own hand, but there it is. In a sick way, it’s made me feel invincible, because while there’s still a finite chance that I’ll die from getting hit by a car or by having a heart attack, the odds are that I will eventually kill myself at some point in my life. If I can’t convince myself that life is worth living, than by default, I’ll have convinced myself that it’s not.
This is not brinksmanship. This is not a cry for help. This is simply cold, hard epidemiology. It is well known and well studied that the end point of depression that fails to go into remission is suicide, and while you can survive in this twilight gray zone of never feeling normal, subsistence is a far cry from healthy living.
I will try not to look into the abyss too long. But every year it just gets harder and harder.
Something for the rag and bone man Over my dead body Something big is gonna happen Over my dead body Someone’s son or someone’s daughter Over my dead body This is how I end up sucked in Over my dead body I’m gonna go to sleep And let this wash all over me We don’t really want a monster taking over Tip toe around, tie him down We don’t want the loonies takin’ over Tip toe around, tie him down May pretty horses come to you as you sleep I’m gonna go to sleep And let this wash all over me
Saying “I give up” solves nothing.
J Angelo Racoma looks back at the argument that Apple switching to the x86 would be tantamount to the suicide of Apple Computer, Inc..
I think the analysis that is missing is the fact that the Mac/Intel platform is not equivalent to the Win/Intel platform. If anything, Mac/Intel is a superset containing Win/Intel, in the same way that AMD64 is a superset of x86.
The beautiful thing about running OS X on an x86 platform is that you don’t have to worry about backwards compatibility. Windows is still tied down to 1980s era hardware paradigms. It still needs to worry about the 15 IRQs of the original IBM PC. It still has to worry about real mode vs protected mode. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s still code sitting in their kernel that deals with ISA hardware. In other words, Windows needs to deal with BIOS, and BIOS is ancient technology as far as computers go.
With OS X, you can throw away all that cruft, which they do. (Disclaimer: I have yet to buy a Mac/Intel machine, as I’m waiting for the release of Leopard.) So BIOS is replaced with the more modern EFI. MBR is replaced with GPT. No more worrying about conflicting IRQs. No more worrying about being limited to one primary partition and one extended partition. Mac/Intel is, if anything, reviving the x86 platform and making it more modern.
This is ultimately the only reason PPC is superior—it too is not tied down to 1980s paradigms of hardware. It is at least grounded in the 1990s, and Open Firmware can at least deal with PCI, AGP, USB, and Firewire in a native fashion, not in the patched-up and kludgey way they try to make it work with BIOS. People talk about speed as if MHz were all that mattered, but when you got right down to it, you have to look at the entire platform.
In any case, one of the cool things about being on a non-Intel platform was that you didn’t have to keep up with the Joneses. When I used an x86 machine, I felt like I was upgrading my CPU every 6 months or something retarded like that. Meanwhile, I’ve been happy with the performance of my PPC machines for the past four years. Maybe it’s just a change in expectations, since I was never a gamer in the first place, and am even less so now.
Even in the Motorla days, that’s what impressed me about the Mac. People would keep their Macs alive for years, and I never saw them as frustrated as I would get when Windows would blue screen or when some of my cheap hardware would basically burn up in a shower of sparks. People talk as if all hardware were equivalent, as if that cheap-ass motherboard is as good as a decent Abit or ASUS mobo, but in my experience, that’s not true at all. You get what you pay for, and if you buy cheap stuff, it just doesn’t last.
And at this stage in the game, Macs no longer cost twice as much as Windows machines do. The last Mac I bought cost $599, and I didn’t even have to assemble it myself.
I wonder if the Vista kernel still has code for dealing with ISA hardware?
Ultimately, this is where Vista will inevitably fall down. It is locked down to the hardware paradigm of 20 years ago. People will continue to make ridiculous claims like BIOS should be good enough for anyone, and who really needs more than 640kb of RAM. But I think change is good.
Maybe in another six years, Windows will come out with a version that is actually written for a modern hardware platform.
The next new thing will be hypervisors, like Xen and Parallels, and I think a modern hardware platform without any legacy cruft is a must for this to take off. One day, everyone will be running both Windows and Mac OS X on the same machine the way you can run Aqua and X simultaneously in OS X.
I’m writing this to say In a gentle way Thank you—but no I will live my life as I Will undoubtedly die—alone
I’m writing this to say In a gentle way Thank you… I will live my life as I… oh For whether you stay or stray An in-built guilt catches up with you
And as it comes around to your place At 5 A.M., wakes you up And it laughs in your face
Nothing like a nice sunset to snap me out of a terrible mood.
The irony here is that BAS was somewhat consoled by the fact that I am no longer lonely and depressed, just lonely, except for some reason this grew on my mind all weekend. It didn’t help that my iPod decided to play a bunch of Smiths and Morrissey songs all in row, capped off by the wondrously plaintive “Somebody” by Depeche Mode.
I love watching the sun set into the sea. Because my car windows were incredibly dirty and I couldn’t catch the sun as I zoomed past at 80 mph, I decided to stop at the vista point off the I-5 adjacent to Camp Pendleton and take some pictures. I remember AJR and EDR suggesting that I top off every day with watching the sun set that one December day when it felt like summer and we ended up going to PB to do just that, watch the sun dive below the waves. I always seem to forget such powerfully effective but simple pieces of advice.
That managed to snap me out of my brooding a little. As the season continues to turn, I can expect my mood to become increasingly sucky, but what can you do. At least I won’t have to deal with snow.
The notion of sacrificing your life for others, embedded in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, closing paralleling the New Testament, brings to mind what I find to be a viable adaptionist claim: that some individuals need to die for the good of others in the same genetic pool, which is probably pretty harsh if you happen to be that individual so chosen by selection pressure.
And in the current state of mind I’m in, in the state of solitarity that I’ve been living, I can’t help but ponder that maybe in my particular local segment of the genetic pool, I’m that guy. (What a convoluted way of developing a Messianic delusion.)
I can’t help but review my misfortunes in what is ultimately a commentary on my reproductive fitness, and for the past 11 years, I haven’t really made any progress.
I feel stuck.
Part of this is the fact that I’m scared shitless about reaching out and meeting people. I used to be able to do this with at least half-hearted enthusiasm, but now I’d really just rather cower in my cloistered cell apartment and stare at the world through the filter of this computer screen. I don’t know what it is that is so paralyzing about trying to, at the least, make new friends, much less try to date women, but I’ve simply decided that I can’t do it, and that’s the end of it.
The other thing that I feel is impeding me is the fact that I can’t seem to figure out what I find enjoyable. There was a time in childhood and adolescence when I actually had fun once in a while, but it now seems like a distant memory of an echo of a dream. A psychiatrist would say that this is a classic symptom of major depression, this loss of pleasure in formerly pleasurable activities. But what did I used to do? Play games, I suppose. Dance. Write. Sing. I have definitely lost interest in playing games. I don’t do much singing and dancing these days. About the only thing I feel compelled to do is write, and it isn’t so much for the purpose of enjoyment, but more to get my thoughts out there, instead of forever swirling futilely through my mind. I’ve long viewed my need to write as akin to my need to defecate, urinate, and breathe.
So what do I do when I actually have free time? I read a lot. Most of my friends would say that this is probably not a good idea, because God knows that the last thing I need to do is do more thinking. I have finally come to agree with my friends’ diagnosis that thinking about things has gotten me into much more trouble than its worth, and I’m trying to figure out ways to not think. I probably should get into meditation. That may do wonders for my mental hygiene.
I also like to write random, rambling screeds filled with pseudo-scientific, pseudo-philosophical trash. There is, I guess, a part of me that revels in my quasi-erudition. There is a simple, childish part of me that is entertained by the sound of complex words, and the unexpected juxtaposition of what at first glance seem to be non-sequiturs.
So this is the only thing these days. And I’m not that good at it.
I suppose I should, at the last, get serious about this and try to learn the craft. I’ve gotten away with half-assed attempts of creating narrative structure, and if I look at what I’ve written in the past with a critical eye, I have a hard time with plotting. This applies to both the essays I’ve written for various academic purposes as well as the unfinished stories that I’ve dreamed up. I can think of the setting, I can think of plot outline. If I’m lucky, I can think of the characters. But I can never get the characters to believably move from scene to scene, much less get to the point of it all.
There is perhaps something profoundly screwed up about my frontal lobes. I’ve always suspected that I have some executive dysfunction, with this inability to rationally order my actions so as to get to my goal. Sometimes I feel like I like creating my own mental versions of Zeno’s Paradox. I always seem to aim for the half-way point instead of actually going for the actual end, and then if I magically actually get to that half-way point, I aim for half of that again. Clearly this makes everything I try to accomplish become an infinite task, and I don’t know. Maybe it’s all related to the fact that I never liked finishing books (although I do, nonetheless.) Finishing a book has always had this let down effect on me. Sort of like waking up from out of a good dream—now I have to face the real world again.
So that’s what I should do with my free time, I guess. Write. Write like I’m serious about it. Write like I actually want to get published. Not this masturbatory ranting that I’ve been going at for the past (nearly) six(!) years.
I think, for now, the matter should be closed, and I shouldn’t think about it again unless something changes drastically. I will not go out there looking for people who might make my current existence less miserable. There is nothing I fear most than finding someone I really like and then managing to screw it up big-time by getting infatuated with them, and so I’m just going to stop, and, unless things change, I’m just going to have to let the invisible hand of selection pressure eventually rub my genetic material out of existence. So it goes.
Interestingly, both SSC and BAS have had recent conversations with me expressing their concern that I’m not “out there” looking, and yes, it does appeal to this primordial desire to not be alone, but the amount of brain damage that I would have to repair in order for this to be a sensible goal seems so gargantuan that every time I think about it, I just have to give up in despair. I think I just need to stop thinking about things that make me despair, which if you ennumerate them, are actually quite numerous. And given that I’d rather not really regularly drink myself into unconsciousness or smoke myself out into a stupor, I’m hard-pressed to think of ways that I might be successful in achieving this endeavor. Sure, it’s easy to bury myself in work, but that is clearly not healthy either. So I guess there’s meditation, although I have heard good things about the successfulness of narcissism.
Despite my sophistry, and my intellectual understanding that I am not a freak for not wanting to be with someone, I guess I’m just a victim of society’s bias against people who are alone. For the longest time, yes, I couldn’t stand it. It drove me crazy. I have cried about it. I have sat around in a daze, dead to the outside world, pondering the ways I’ve screwed things up, all the things I’ve failed to do, all the women that I’ve been infatuated with but didn’t do anything about. But whatever doesn’t kill you only delays the inevitable only makes you stronger (hahahaha!) so I’ve learned to live with it, kind of. There have been days where I didn’t think it was worth being awake, or even alive for, but those moments pass, and after all these years of (mostly) self-inflicted insanity, here I am at least coming to grips with the way that my brain is abnormal, for better or for worse.
I know better than to inflict my unique flavor of insanity on another sentient being, and so I stay away, despite this desire to not be alone. It’s the least messy way, at least for now.
The reason this came to mind is two-fold: (1) last night someone started having chest pain, and up to that point I had been feeling sorry for myself. When an actual clinical situation came up, I found myself cheering up a little, which just goes to show how my life revolves around work, and that’s the only thing that is even remotely fulfilling. (2) My mom told me about a pharmacist at her work whom she’s worked with for a while, who always recognizes her on the phone. She was a widow who lived by herself, and for two days, she didn’t show up to work and she didn’t call in, so her boss ended up calling the police to check up on her, and they found her all dressed up for work and dead on the floor of her bathroom. This reminds me of novella written by Peter S. Beagle entitled “A Dance for Emilia” which is based on his relationship with his oldest friend Joseph Mazo. The opening scene describes getting a phone call where the character Jacob finds out his friend Sam died of a heart attack, except he wasn’t discovered for a couple of days because he lived alone.
This got me thinking about the down sides of living alone, namely, it takes a couple of days before anyone misses you, and I guess it’s kind of terrible thing, to keel over dead on your bathroom floor. If it’s instantaneous, I guess that’s not too bad, but imagine if it takes a while for you to die, and you’re just lying face down staring at the tiles, unable to get up, and you have to ponder dying alone. At least when you die in the hospital, there are other people around, even if no one does come to visit you.
The other thing that got me contemplating dying alone is when I did something to my back the other day. I am clearly not a kid anymore, because I tried to lift my mattress, and my lower back just seized up and I fell onto the floor onto my side, unable to move without causing excruciating pain. I was lying there for at least a few minutes, wondering if I was just going to lie there all night until I fell asleep and maybe hopefully by the next day my back would be O.K. And I was thinking that shit like this wouldn’t happen if I lived with someone else.
But I guess you learn self-sufficiency one way or the other, and I just fought through the pain and got up. I was sweaty with the exertion and the pain, but what else are you gonna do? And I thought about growing old like that, when I’d be less and less able to get myself up, and it’s kind of depressing.
But I guess we’ll cross that bridge when if we get to it.
Yeah, that shit is depressing, but what are you gonna do? More importantly, what am I gonna do? For now, nothing.
I think the book in The Chronicles of Narnia that left the strongest impression on me was The Magician’s Nephew[site by Keith Webb][on wikipedia]. The setting that I remember most strongly is the ruined and blasted world of Charn, destroyed by the White Witch Jadis by using magic that seems strongly allegorical to nuclear weaponry. I was struck by how the monarchy of Charn started off being benevolent and wise, then became corrupted and evil, eventually spawning the monstrosity that is the White Witch. I also remember the hue of redness encompassing Charn. (Was C.S. Lewis trying to evoke medieval visions of Hell?) What was interesting to me was the explanation for this reddish light—Charn’s sun is a red giant star. While this could’ve just been an idiosyncrasy of this particular world, it actually evoked in me the idea that the civilization of Charn had existed so long that their formerly sun-like star had exhausted its nuclear fuel and was beginning to cool and expand. For some reason (although this is apparently not the reason for its destruction), this also reminds me of the destruction of the planet of Krypton, but that is neither here nor there.
In a work that is so theologically-based, specifically, Christianity-based, it is hard not to think about theological issues, and the idea that popped into my head is the question as to whether corruption is an inevitability without saving grace.
Now the laws of thermodynamics tells us that disorder ever increases, so it would seem that in fact, this is the natural way of things. And yet, human life, and life in general, seems to belie this basic law, and points to the fact that thermodynamics is, at its base, a statistical argument, and cannot easily predict local effects or the ultimate fate of an open system. It cannot be denied that some branches of evolution have led to more and more complex ordered organisms. While we we cannot ever prove that we evolved from primordial slime forming the first prokaryotic cell, we know for a fact that we all start out as a single eukaryotic cell in the womb (or in an egg in some organisms.) We also have a lot of evidence that mitochondria are descended from prokaryotes. In the long run, yes, it is still an increase of disorder because our complexity comes at the price of the creation of our waste products which are incredibly disordered.
My point, however, is that it would seem that it is inevitable that people can start off good and noble, and over the years and the generations, they will definitely be evil and base. Lewis’ commentary on the monarchs of Charn outline this idea and apply it to government, and I can’t help but immediately apply this to the decay of the American Republic.
The interesting thing is the idea of error-correction. This is part and parcel of our modern information culture and economy. The brilliance of the Internet is based significantly on the idea of error-correction. Error-correction mostly prevents the inevitable corruption of ordered information (although we all know nothing is perfect) and better than 99 times out of 100, things turn out O.K. Life itself is pretty good at error-correction—the replication of DNA is wonderfully faithful, although clearly there are errors that are made. (And yet errors are the basis of evolution and increasing complexity and order.)
I think one of the unique things about the American Republic is its basis in a potentially self-correcting document—the Constitution. But, more immediately, the checks and balances established by the Constitution are also error-correcting.
The reason why the Republic is in such crisis is that the Bush administration and their adherents are greatly intent on (1) dismantling these checks and balances and (2) destroying the Constitution. Once these error-correcting mechanisms are disabled, we put ourselves on the fast-track of inevitable corruption, evil, and atrocities and crimes against humanity (and while Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are bad enough, you can be assured that things are bound to get much, much worse. With error-correction disabled in DNA replication, what you inevitably get is cancer. And I tend to think about Empire this way. Empire is analogous to cancer—eventually fatal to its host in the end.
So, if you wanted to be unnecessarily mystical, you can think of error-correction (and selection pressure) as the Hand of God. God® and His Saving Grace™ are the only way to prevent the inevitable corruption and decay of the universe, and the only way to actually increase local complexity and order.
(And by stretching some metaphors, Bush and his cronies are necessarily agents of Satan, who are interested in disabling error-correction.)
There are three musicals that I used to know all the lyrics to: “Beauty and the Beast”, “Once On This Island”, and “Rent” Each one encompassed a particular period of my life, and “Rent” reminds me of my junior and senior year in college, especially because my roommate at the time was quite obsessed with it. Being in college, the Bohemian lifestyle, the conflict between making money and making art—these things all resonated.
Jonathan Larson adapted Puccini’s “La Vie Boheme”, changing the setting from Paris in the 1800s to NYC in the 1990s, and the plague besetting the characters is AIDS instead of TB. As I learn more about HIV, parts of the musical waft through my brain, and sure, it’s a consumer-friendly version, sanitized and airbrushed, nowhere near as messy as the real thing, but what is amazing is the advances in treatment that have occurred in the past 10 years.
The sad thing is that it is not necessarily the virus itself that baffles us. Sure, we don’t have a cure, but at least we now have ways of controlling it. The problem is that you need to have thousands and thousands of dollars to afford the drugs. And so atrocities occur in this country, to say nothing about what happens in developing countries, particularly in Africa.
HIV (like many health care issues) is intimately tied with the inequity of resource distribution inherent in our peculiar economic institutions, and it seems that talking about inevitably leads to talking about dreaming of the coming revolution.
I’m not sure if this might have been when my infatuation with NYC may have started. “Rent” came out in 1996, and I remember those sticky August nights in Manhattan in 1997, doing the tourist things, being obsessed with complex tangle of subway lines, watching “Les Miserable” on Broadway, dreaming of things turning out for the better.
My oldest friend, and then my good friend from college, and now my sister have all moved out the NYC, the wounded autumnal city. There is something apocalyptically prescient about the line that discusses “living in America at the end of the millenium” and while there were worries about Y2K, the Fall of the Republic will likely be remembered in the history books as beginning with November 7, 2000.
Man, Rosario Dawson is hot, but anyway.
Wow, that was quite convoluted and rambling.
So I like to blame all this on damned cats. Now I’ve got nothing against cats, per se. I kind of like how they’re not literal ass-kissers like dogs are (and I am a dog person.) But the problem is that I’m deathly allergic to them, and on Thursday night I got a double dose.
The most distressing part was probably the chest tightness. When I was a kid, I used to have terrible asthma, and for the most part that has gone away, except I get some exercise-induced wheezing, and whenever I get sick, I’m coughing for a month after I get better. And then there are cats.
I begin to worry when I start coughing. I never get truly wheezy except if I exercise. The only evidence of bronchospasm is this nagging cough that isn’t just post-nasal drip.
And then I rub my eyes.
Thankfully, I have an albuterol inhaler. But the horse was out of the gate when it came to the itchy eyes and dripping nose, and the night was pretty much shot and I still had to review a couple of articles in order to give a quick talk on Friday. This meant very little restful sleep, and I went to work under a fog.
I did have a bizarre moment of dejá vù at work, about this really interesting rheumatological case. When I thought about it, though, I realize that the first time I heard about something similar was in a strange dream I had in 3rd year or maybe 4th year of med school. Things like that make me wonder if sometimes spacetime does leak, and that there are ways to get a glimpse of the future.
I luckily get out by 4:30 pm, and end up seriously crashing out at 7 pm. That was basically my Friday.
But, of course, for no good reason, I wake up at 1 am, and I can’t go back to sleep.
OK, so maybe there is a reason. There are a million thoughts fly through my head.
I feel like my brain is on fire.
But there’s no point in contemplating these things. Who knows how anything is supposed to turn out? I keep having these moments of portentousness, when I think something big is going to happen to me, but I’m cynical and jaded enough to realize that this is just wishful thinking, or maybe hypomania.
Now, sitting in front of this computer, I feel trapped. Like I’m living my own Groundhog Day, whirling around in circles, doing the same thing over and over again. And this here is definitely the depression talking, because at times like this, I feel like nothing is ever going to change for me, or if things do, it’ll always be for the worse.
Whatever happened to enjoying life’s simple pleasures?
Oh, what was it I had meant to say? There are a million thoughts careening through my addled brain at this benighted hour, and I sit here tongue-tied like an idiot.
I am slowly making my way through my apartment, trying to at least clean off the centimeter of grime that has built up on all horizontal surfaces. What kind of really grosses me out is the realization that at least 70% of all this dust is sloughed-off human skin infested with dust mites. Nasty.
I only have my Linux box up right now, and immediately, I am reminded as to how much of a Mac chauvanist I’ve become. (Oh the bitter irony!) I am immediately thrown off by the fact that I only have thousands and not millions of colors available (but that is a glitch resulting from the fact that Fedora Core is not recognizing my video card and definitely does not recognize my flatscreen.) I am also thrown off by the lack of fonts, and not having Flash, and by the fact that there is no default mail client configured.
I also just tried to change the resolution of my screen, and sadly, X won’t let me do it without having to restart X (although I realize this is a far cry from having to reboot the computer, like Windows would frequently make me.
But more importantly at this point, I ponder the meaning (and meaninglessness) of coincidences. I try to stop thinking about hidden meaning possibly embedded in every day mundane experiences, but my brain is a pattern recognition automaton, and I basically can’t help it.
Today I noticed that there were seven silver cars of otherwise different make and model lined up alongside one side of a parking structure I drove through this evening. This is surely meaningless, and yet I can’t help but entertain the possibility that God is trying to tell me something. (I don’t know, maybe He likes silver cars?)
Somehow I have managed to pull the directional needle towards the positive side of the x axis, and have once again come to the realization that I really am nothing more than a clockwork orange. All you have to do adjust a few chemicals, manipulate a few synapses, and somehow I’m slightly less depressed than I usually am.
Today I spent most of the afternoon staring outside the window.
At least I didn’t just go to sleep right away again when I got home like I have been for the past two and a half weeks.
I am most likely clinically depressed, but, like most depressed people, I’m so depressed that I can’t motivate myself enough to do anything about it.
This is unfortunate.
But, whatever.
I can honestly say that, within the past two months, I have indeed experienced a day that where I was unequivocally happy, but I will leave it at that.
Nothing lasts forever.
Or for more than a day, for that matter.
But we won’t go there. At least not right now.
These games came out almost 10 years ago, but I spent way too much time playing them both. Final Fantasy 7 defined my senior year in college, and Alpha Centauri was how I spent my year in existential limbo.
Like many things, however, they both served as fuel for my not-too-original science-fictional novel-writing aspirations. The coincidence of the world being named “The Planet” in both games (even though at the end of the FFVII, you discover that “The Planet” is in fact an alternate or far-future Earth) suggested an obvious scenario to me: FFVII takes place on Alpha Centauri A3, which was colonized by humans not once, but twice.
The other thing that I found coincidental was that the forerunner race in FFVII—the Ancients—were also known as Cetrans. This suggests the adjective Centauran or maybe Cetian. Both star systems are known to harbor G-type stars similar to the Sun and would theoretically be candidates for containing earth-like worlds.
So my theory/background plot is that “The Planet” is Alpha Centauri A3 was initially colonized by humanity in the first push for interstellar colonization. These humans became the ones known as Ancients. Humanity managed to push onward, colonizing many other star systems containing earth-like worlds, and a human subgalactic empire ensued for millenia, perhaps. Eventually, different disasters like interstellar warfare, economic catastrophes, and simple failure to thrive (like the lost colony on Roanoke, VA, for example) caused disconnection between the different star systems. In this era of decay, more dominant colonies started on a new wave of (re)colonization, rediscovering old abandoned worlds. So these neo-humans find Alpha Centauri A3, which had been extremely depopulated by strange unknown forces, and they landed their colony ship at the site that became Midgar. (Midgar has always reminded me of a space-station, specifically of Deep Space 9 from Star Trek.)
The reason I was convinced of the colonization idea is that there is such a huge gap in technology between Midgar and the surrounding world, reminiscent of the tech gap between the metropolis and the countryside of developing countries—themselves also former colonies. There is also almost no history tracing back human settlement to more primitive times. There is no history of the agricultural or industrial revolution on the Planet, only evidence of the space revolution and the information revolution. The civilization on the Planet seems to have arisen de novo.
Another incidentally similar phrase in the two games is “the Voice of the Planet.” In Alpha Centauri, this refers to a latent high-intelligent fungal superorganism that humanity makes Contact with. In FFVII, this is a planet-wide spiritual entity akin to the Gaia organism.
(In an unrelated concept, the extraterrestial intelligence known as Jenova has a lot in common with another Squaresoft concept—Lavos from Chrono Trigger. Both are planetary parasites that cruise the cosmos sucking on spiritual energy.)
In any case, that’s as far as I’ve gotten with the idea.
OK, sure, this will definitely come out culturally elitist, but the phenomenon known as digg.com is yet another example of the principle of mediocrity in capitalist economies. (Or, for the more politically correct minded, perhaps we can call it the principle of democracy.) Like Walmart, the American public school system, Microsoft Windows, and our pathetic dependence on hydrocarbons for fuel, the “good enough” is the enemy of the “best” and, contrary to what Social Darwinists would have you believe, laissez faire capitalism leads to championing the mediocre.
What brings me to this thought is this random post by Mark Pilgrim, renowned A-list blogger, who states that Digg users are dumber than goldfish. If you thought that Slashdot was bad, you ain’t seen nothing until you read the comments on Digg.
Now granted, maybe there is some hidden confounding factor that I’m missing. Maybe there’s a causative agent that compels mental midgets to comment on Digg posts, but whenever I make the mistake of trying to read some of the comments, I begin to mourn the sorry state of our school system and the continual stupefication and generalized mental retardation that our society apparently likes to maintain and seems to value so much. (I mean, look at the Bush Administration, need I say more?) I’m not even talking about being ignorantly offensive in a politically incorrect way. I’m talking about severe lapses in logic and complete ignorance about how the real world actually works. I mean, maybe the average Digg poster is like 14 years old, white and male?
Anyway, what might be nice is some way for users to mark stories as duplicates. I think it would be pretty easy functionality to add, and, sure, like the act of Digging itself, it can easily be abused, but at least it can prevent this maddening sense of dejá vù </rant>
Without the existence of law, there cannot be property.
In an unrelated conversation with BPD, we started shooting the shit about capitalist economies. He is right in asserting that capitalism does not require anyone to be fair. It is a system setup to encourage people to look out only for themselves, and fuck everyone else. In of itself, there is nothing wrong with that.
His take was, in a sense, an apologia for the depredations of companies such as Enron, Worldcom, Adelphia, and the like. And I get his point. It’s nonsensical to expect greedy bastards to act altruistically. But my counter to that is that we also live in a democratic republic, which is, by definition, a nation of laws.
Fact of the matter is that laws form complex, highly-interrelated structures, often known as civilization, and if you obviate certain laws, you run the risk of destabilizing the entire structure. Hence, frequently, things like theft and deceit are explicitly made anathema in these structures.
Simply put, stealing and lying are pretty much things that most civilizations cannot afford to espouse, no matter how capitalistic you want your civilization to be.
Laws against stealing encode the notion of property. Laws against deception encode the notion of trust. Interestingly, these two ideas—property and trust—are the basis of any and every economic system.
Without property, and without trust, you cannot have transactions.
So my argument is this: if you allow laws to be broken willy-nilly, particularly laws that encode the primordial ideas of property and trust, you run the risk of completely destabilizing your civilization. In other words, you encourage anarchy. Whether this anarchy will simply result in the rich and powerful being able to disregard each and every law ever drafted, leaving the less fortunate to the tender mercies of their capricious whim, or whether this will result in the violent masses rising up and killing the rich and the powerful (and make no mistake, it has happened many times in human history), I can’t predict, but in any case, your capitalist economy is destined to be shot to shit if you let this kind of bullshit stand.
Hence, unless you’re a fan of anarchy and subsistence economies, it is always in your self-interest to punish people who are proven to have broken the law.